The Great Jewish “Whiteness” Thing.

Michael Lumish 11/09/2019Comments Off on The Great Jewish “Whiteness” Thing.573 Views

The question of Ashkenazi Jewish “whiteness” is receiving increased attention.

If to be “white” means anything it means to be of European descent. But in today’s western-left political culture what it really means is “bad, racist, colonialist, imperialist, hater of all-things-good.”

In other words, it means to be a contemptible person.

To be “white” no longer merely suggests ethnicity, but a toxic ontology (way of being) and a toxic epistemology (way of knowing.)

Ironically, this racist view of “whiteness” primarily derives from those who claim to be the ideological descendants of Martin Luther King, Jr. If King stood for anything, however, he stood for judging people according to character, not ethnicity and not gender. Those who despise “whiteness” assign this racial category to Ashkenazi Jews in order to spread that hatred onto one of the most persecuted peoples on the planet. This tendency among “progressives” is nothing if not illiberal.

It is, at least in part, for this reason, that many American Jews are walking away from the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.

The reality is that the entire notion of Ashkenazi Jews as “White people” is very new (from a historical perspective) and it is also completely detached from any historical context, including in America, where, as recently as the early 1960s there were still quotas on Jewish enrollment in some Ivy League schools. Ironically, since the origin of the European pseudoscientific racial classifications (dividing humanity as White, Black, and Yellow races); Jews in Europe (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike) were regularly persecuted on the basis of being “non-white.”

This is worth a read because the question of Jewish “whiteness” goes to the question of Jewish indigeneity within the Land of Israel.

And the fact of Jewish indigeneity goes to the very heart of the Movement for Jewish Freedom, which we affectionately call “Zionism.”